Books, food, friends, and Virginia Woolf.
"I spare you the twists and turns of my cogitations, for no conclusion was found on the road to Headingly, and I ask you to suppose that I soon found out my mistake about the turning and retraced my steps to Fernham."--Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Monday, February 09, 2009

We interrupt this litblog...

An occasional feature just to remind us that we live in a world that is...well, very, very scary.

(h/t Rachel Maddow for showing the graphic after Obama's masterful first presser.)

3 comments:

As I tell my students, you can manipulate facts and data by leaving out material that may be relevant. I pointed out on the New Democrat Network blog that this chart includes only the two most recent recessions, the ones that began at the turn of the last two decades.

Those recessions were very mild and quite short compared to most post-World War II recessions.

I was in the work force (and out of it, collecting unemployment compensation benefits) during the 1974-75 and 1981-83 recessions, each of which hold the record, surely to be broken by our current Great Recession, of 18 months. (It is no coincidence that I eventually got my first full-time job as a community college instructor in 1981-82, when the unemployment rate peaked at 10.6%.)

So this chart, whose source, I believe, is Speaker Pelosi's office, is misleading and simplistic.

There is more relevant and comprehensive data at a number of websites -- for example, the St. Louis Fed's.

Point well taken, Richard, but the last two recessions felt bad enough to me, and this still looks scary. (So you're the man who had the guts to write Lincoln's Doctor's Dog!) Anne -- thanks for linking to me in Reading for Pleasure.